House GOP sees few options on debt

House Republican leaders don’t know how they’re going to address the debt limit later this summer, but early plans show that Washington is casually strolling into a five-month political and legislative minefield.

A clean debt-limit increase without any strings attached — essentially what President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are asking for — doesn’t stand a chance of passing the conservative chamber.

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Dems rail GOP 'obstructionism'

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Speaker John Boehner’s leadership team is looking to squeeze out of an ideologically diverse House Republican Conference anything that can pass. Ahead of a members-only, two-hour meeting next Tuesday, the top idea bouncing around GOP leadership is casually being referred to as a catch-all, kitchen sink plan.

The plan is simple: craft a debt ceiling hike onto a bill loaded with tons of conservative goodies to put lots of options on the table to garner 218 GOP votes.

Options being floated internally include language approving the Keystone XL pipeline, slashing regulations with the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act and additional spending cuts — perhaps even a framework for tax reform.

To make it even more attractive to voters back home, they’d frame it as a so-called job-creation bill. Basically, anything they could say creates jobs has a chance of landing in this legislative package.

There’s also real effort from the right — supported by leadership — to forestall Obama’s health care law in the fight to lift the debt ceiling. Top lawmakers at the Republican Study Committee have met with the Congressional Budget Office to inquire how much the government would save if they delayed the implementation of the health care exchanges and expansion of Medicaid.

“When you have Max Baucus saying it’s a train wreck; when you have every business guy I talk to saying, ‘This thing is a problem and a mess,’ it seems to me there’s elements of that to focus on,” said Rep. Jim Jordan, a conservative from Ohio.

It’s the red-meat kind of stuff Republicans love. Forget that most of it faces stiff headwinds in the Senate, but conversations throughout the Republican Conference show how difficult it will be for GOP leadership to coalesce around a plan.

The most popular opening gamut — cobbling a bunch of conservative ideas together — is splitting the GOP leadership.

“I’m not sold on that,” said Oklahoma Rep. James Lankford, a member of leadership who chairs the party’s policy arm. “Because I think it can come across as sounding gimmicky at some point, but in reality, we have to have economic activity that actually drives it.

“So it’s gotta be proved that if we do this debt ceiling increase, we’re actually going to get the economic activity out of it,” he added. “So gathering enough things together to offset a debt ceiling increase — that may work for a short term to buy a couple months. But not a long term.”

Leadership won’t be able to escape the spotlight: The debt ceiling is almost certainly going to be hit this fall, which could create a double threat of government shutdown and a debt default. The government runs out of money on Sept. 30. Republican aides say that might help them enact entitlement changes and perhaps even replace some sequester cuts.